I wanted to be down in the office by ten this morning, sorting out my new government cabinet and laying out all of our new policies but instead I ended up getting sidetracked by one of my cousins (Koopa), who bombarded me with dozens of emails. Terribly jealous he is, but of course I don’t blame him. I know I don’t have a high opinion of my Irish connections, and when I become an actual politician in the future, I am fully aware that I am going to have to bribe an awful lot of reporters to make sure that the connection is kept out of the public domain in order to preserve my majestic reputation, but I must secretly admit that Koopa is the only O’Shea cousin that I kinda like. Actually tolerate is a more appropriate and accurate word in fact. Why?

When Miller and I were in school, it is with regret that I have to admit that we weren’t entirely popular. To be more frank, we were as popular as a lollipop man wearing a sign saying I’m a big fucking paedophile. Reason? Well peers will always feel jealous of greatness and as you will already be aware, I possess a natural wealth of it. However, you may also be surprised to learn that before one particular school incident, Miller seemed to too.

My twin and I were just small lads for our ages. However, our teachers said that we were the best, most dynamic hall monitors that ever patrolled the corridors during break times. Back in the day, Miller and I were magnificent law enforcers. Oh you should have seen us! If one cheeky publess spack face dared have the balls to step into our hallway without permission from a dinnerlady, we would run straight to our teacher's classroom as fast as our tiny legs would carry us and tell on them straight away. Law and order was the rule of our play ground!

Over the course of our first year in secondary school, we reigned supreme. From the halls we were promoted to playground assistant supervisors and we governed with a merciless, iron fist, until one cold and wet winter’s afternoon when the peasants revolted! The revolutionaries came for us! We were chased through our corridors by a mob positively oozing with venom and hatred. That last occurrence where we managed to get football banned for the rest of the term was the straw that broke the camel's back. The proles had taken their time to hatch their vindictive plan and we were as fecked as a schoolboy alone with a P.E teacher. We ran to our teacher’s room but it was empty. We then ran to the next room but there was no teacher in there either. Fighting the urge to piss ourselves, as we were bombarded with pencils, rubbers and rulers, we made a last dash to the Headmaster's office but to our horror we found that his abode was vacant as well. We later found out that a group of boys in our year had made some weedier kids take laxatives and then forced them to unleash their spluttery mud chunks all over each and every school teacher’s car. Once they raised the alarm and saw all of the teachers running out to inspect their chocolate dipped vehicles, they came for us and they got us.

I fought hard against our attackers but there were hundreds of them. I took down as many as I could. They knew if they took me on one at a time they had no chance, but instead the sheer number of bodies toppled me. As I lay squashed at the bottom of a colossal pile-on, Miller managed to somehow break free, and in the mayhem of the moment he escaped. I hoped that he had run to find help, but instead he ran all the way home like the bastard little piggy he was.

The mob eventually stripped me of my uniform and dirty underpants and tied me naked to a tree at the bottom of the Playground. Almost every boy and girl who was a pupil of St Margaret Mary’s R.C School gathered around to watch the vigilante punishment being sadistically doled out to me. Numerous chants about my ‘tiny Cox’ rung loud and proud in the chilly air and just as I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. The ring leaders of this revolt stood forward. John Harding, Shane Tufnell and Mickey Hillier. As I stood in my wet, cold birthday suit, the three boys produced a big white bag that was full of…bird seed. It didn’t take long for the sky rats to begin throwing themselves at me, especially at my one eye monster, since my persecutors took careful effort to make sure that most of the seeds nested in my newly sprouted curly mane. As the flock of birds grew in numbers, the crowds eventually fell away as the Heaven opened with even more fury. Not one teacher noticed I was missing from subsequent classes and so I was still tied to the tree for last break when everyone came out to have one final laugh and poke.

From that day onwards Miller never again strove to follow the rules. He saw law and order as something that was despised. I however fought to reclaim my crown but I was menaced at every turn by my three nemeses! The teachers quickly tired of my new zest for tale telling and I found that I was a sheriff without power. These were dark days where I was constantly harassed and ultimately bullied. Miller slunk into the background, only to re-emerge and completely reinvent himself as the class clown with a new scruffy appearance. Basically a rule breaker. I suspect it was a case of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ but that just wasn’t an option for me. Visionaries often stand alone, isolated, revered and targeted by those who do not understand their higher purpose. Look at Jesus, they crucified him!

At that time Miller wasn’t the only member of family I had at St Margaret Mary’s. I also had six cousins from my mother’s side of the family. The O’Shea clan. Virtually all of them turned their backs on me. I was an embarrassment and they did not want anyone to know that the fearsome O’Shea family had anything to do with a Cox. That was except for one. Koopa. Koopa was in the year above and he must have watched for some time as I was targeted daily. It was not unusual to see me being verbally abused or physically attacked. Without football to occupy my bullies' time, they focused their attentions on me. Then one day they suddenly stopped. The terrible trio pulled me into an empty classroom and I waited for a smack that didn’t come. Instead they gingerly offered me their sincerest apologies and said that they would make sure no one else harassed me again. I thought that they had finally decided that enough was enough and that they respected that I never once cowered from them or hid in lonely cupboards or empty classrooms for weeks at a time while everyone else played happily outside. But just as they were leaving the room we were in, Tuffy turned back and asked if I could make sure that Koopa knew about what had just happened.

I would like to say that my older, so surely more mature cousin, had approached my bullies and through a reasonable discussion he had quelled the negativity that was being forced on me every day by them. However, he quite simply borrowed my uncle's sawn-off shotgun and brought it into school with him in his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rucksack. He then cornered Hard, Tuffy and Hitler and told them that if they went near me again he would sneak into their houses in the middle of the night and blow their fucking heads off. I must admit that Koopa did show some restraint. Had I told my mother what was happening, she wouldn’t of snuck into anyone house but kicked in their fecking front doors and blasted every last mother fucker in the house. Their puppy included.

Koopa looked out for me and from that day I have tried to do the same for him. My mother might be as ruthless as her family and I’m sure I don’t know half a percent of what she has gotten up to in her life but she has always tried to keep her children away from the ‘business’. When Miller started to get sucked in by our Uncle Connor, Mom decided that the family had to get away for good, and somehow my Father got us the pub we’re in now. Koopa has never had this support. His father, my uncle Danny, is just one of Uncle Connors little bitches who will gladly push all of his sons to the front line of Connor’s mad battles. I hope that I can one day show Koopa that there is more to life than the O’Shea Empire.

I know I keep mentioning a lot of uncles and cousins but that’s because there are a lot of 'em. Here is a brief family tree of the immediate O’Shea clan:

Haven’t heard much off your lot since ya Mom and Dad left the business last month. Me Dad tells us that you’ve all gone and moved to Turkey down south. Is that far enough away from the family then? Well you kept that all quiet didn’t ya. What happened to you going to uni?

Anyway, how did z move down to the bucket and spaz town go? Let me know how the new crib is hanging.

The move to Torquay was torturous but as you will no doubt find Millers antics so amusing I will not divulge how your wonderful cousin almost killed us all. (All I will say is that he is THE COX CHEESE, not me!)

Torquay (Not Turkey. School wasn’t just for selling drugs at, you know!) is beautiful. I know you don’t care for Gods Earthly craftsmanship so I won’t describe our new exquisite surroundings as you will most likely find someway of devaluing it to a crude insult. The new ‘crib’ however is amazing. There was a party last night when we arrived. The locals threw it for us especially. They said the last landlord was crap and they couldn’t wait for the new reign. Wonderful people.

It’s a shame that Mom has fallen out with all of her brothers but I do feel that it is most understandable. Mom specifically said to Uncle Connor that if he tried to push the business into the North of Birmingham you would suffer terrible consequences. I take it the rest of Uncle Macky has still not been found. Is his head still in the fridge? Perhaps if Uncle Connor had listened to Mother, Uncle Mackey would have been let go with only his balls missing! And how is Uncle Bernard? Is he still in hospital. The poor bastard.

You need to watch your back. The Donnelley might have lost the battle but I don’t think the war is over. You might be in control of the doors in Sutton for the minute but they’ll be back!

Give my best to the surviving members of the family while they are still alive.

It’s a shame about Mackey 4 sure but lookee what we av now. We’re Lords of the manor baby. Uncle Connor was right on the money. The North side is full of rich brats who are happy to piss all of Daddys hard money on our cheap nasty drugs. The punters on our old patch were just a bunch of bum picking dole beggars who can’t afford a decent pint of piss, let alone a gram of snow. We’re making a fucking mint now man!

We’re all gonna be fucking millionaires before Christmas. You lot should throw everything in the van and just come back to us! Oh, Uncle Bernard will be fine; he still has his left leg and main member.

While you’re around watching grannies sip on their lemonades by da seaside (which I bet you fooking love you kinky shit), I’ll be watching me Hoes sipping on ma juices. YEAH!

I will be getting the women too, don’t you worry about that! Power my friend, women love strong powerful men and that is what this position offers me. Koopa my ol’pal, envy me because I’ve won the sex lottery! I’m gonna be trying out plenty of love cushions. In fact I’m a bit worried that all the loving might get in the way of work, but I’m sure I can be professional.

In regards to returning to the family, we are quite happy here thank you. In fact if you have any sense you should get out of there now. Yeah you might be ‘minted’ for the minute but big wads of cash won’t do you any good when you’re dead in six months, in hell, getting a pitch fork in your love spuds.

Uncle Connor will keep on pushing. Even if you manage to hang onto Sutton without any more epic bloody battles with the Donnelly’s, I bet he won’t be happy. He’ll want Town next and then you’ll be fecked. Grandad Mickey might have been a vicious ol’bastard who started the whole thing off but he knew his limits, which is why the family have stayed in business for so long but now that Uncle Connor is in charge, he’ll go too far and he is gonna crash his joy ride with you lot in the car. He thinks that he is some kind of a God and he isn’t.

So thanks for the offer but I’ll stick to a proper business thank you!

This is a PROPER biz. We have trainee PAYE staff, area managers, monthly targets, bonus schemes. Everything properly organized ya know. We even have an office with a well fit secretary that I get to bang on Thursdays. It’s all thanks to your Mom you know. She turned Granddads little paddy gang into a bleedin corporation. Miller should have stayed. He was doing good. If he had stayed here, we’d have given him his own team and the Erdington area to manage!

Will Miller be joint manager with you? Why isn’t he the licensee, he’s been a barman since he was 15 at our place. I suppose Uncle Johnny asked you because Miller has a criminal record, hasn’t he?

WHY ISN’T MILLER THE LICENSEE? Because he is a feckin retard and I’m educated brilliance. That’s why!

WILL MILLER BE JOINT MANAGER? HA HA HA HA bloody HA! Noooooooooooooo. On the journey down Miller told me one of his ‘amazing’ idea’s to boost business. He said he was going to go around town to all of the AA meetings to lure all of the alkies to the pub! He thinks he is going to be the Pied fecking Piper of the pub trade, dancing through town with a line of pissy pant hobbo’s and drunks merrily following him to our distinguished abodes. MY public house will be a place of sophistication. A meeting place for the great minds of the English Riviera. Not a place to get rat arsed! That is not the upper class way.

No we’re okay thank you. You stay where you are. This is Torquay, not Birmingham. People are quite docile here. Simple folk. They’re not street, not like me. I think they are probably a bit scared of us city lads, I’ll keep them in line. I will be a firm Monarch of my Kingdom. The problem with society nowadays is that the threat of authority is getting more and more distant. Everyone behaved in the old days when they were worried they’d get hung for stealing a loaf of bread but today you can kick a copper in the pink elephant trunk and get off with just a warning. Nope, I’ll be fair but firm. No one will mess with me.

It was still dark when Dad came and woke us all up and he was in a right anxious temper. He said it was because he wanted us to get to our new exciting home as soon as possible, but it seemed more likely that the pointy nose twonk wanted us to get away as quickly as we could without being noticed by the neighbours (especially by the murderous Mr. O’Dowd at number 69 who is/was our landlord, and who, I’m quite sure, Dad hasn’t paid any rent to for almost four months. If Dad thinks Mr. O’Dowd will just let him slip away into the night, he’s a bigger idiot than I give him credit for).

Dad whizzed the hire removal van outside our house (which he had parked around the corner last night) and like some sort of rabble military operation we all had to rush the heap of manky boxes and torn black bags of all our shitty worldly goods into the van on the double. As soon as the last delicate cardboard box of kitchenware was tossed in, Dad shut the door and was swiftly half way down the road shouting back that he’ll see us down there. By ‘us’ he meant me, Clint, Curly (Dad is quite happy to be getting some slave labour he said) and a very hung over Miller who was driving us to Devon in his supped up, rust bucket, death mobile.

I felt more scared getting into a car with Miller behind the wheel than I did the time I had to see our camp doctor for a bowel inspection (How can you tell if it’s a finger he’s poking you with if you have to bend over the bed facing away from him. In fact is that normal? I really should ask someone. Maybe there’s a phone line about that sort of stuff). Even though he was having trouble driving in a straight line he still thought it was ‘cool’ to see how fast the snot box would go on the empty M5 motorway. I begged him to slow down but unfortunately I was not backed up at all by Curly or Clint who just egged him on to go faster. He actually managed to get it to go 115mph and it really felt like the shit box was going to shake out of existent. Miller was manically laughing at his own joke because he kept quoting Scotty from Star Trek ‘She canny take much more Captain!’ Where are the bloody police when they’ve got the best chance yet to arrest my muppet brother? Their never around when you need them.

If anything was going to kill us you’d have thought it was the fact that Miller was driving at brainless speeds when he couldn’t even see properly but no, that was not it. Miller soon slowed down when a police car was spotted in the distance and from then onwards he seemed content with only going 90 mph once they were gone.

I expected Millers toxic levels and excess speed to be the reason for us all to end up in the arsehole of a tree near Bristol but no, it was almost caused by his inane fear of birds. Miller can’t even walk down a street without making a tit of himself. It only takes a cooing pigeon to flutter nearby and he looks like some kind of bad 80’s break dancer with shitty pants. He’ll literally dive for cover with arms flagging about to protect himself from what he must think will be a violent attack by a feathered rat. So we’re cruising down the motorway, listening to some crap one hit wonder on radio 1 (the song is called Yellow, I dunno who it is by) and suddenly we swerve across to the slow lane and then back to the fast and all because a bloody low flying seagull was supposedly going to hit the car, or so Miller said. As he veered off the road he made one of the tyres pop and we were lucky to come to a stop on the hard shoulder without getting mangled. None of us are members of the AA and we couldn’t change the tyre because Miller didn’t have a spare one. We ended up walking for about two hours to the nearest service station to give Dad a ring to ask him to come and help us! I keep saying to Dad that I need a mobile phone but he thinks they are a waste of money, just another way to take more money off of the poor, the government’s way to keep the proles (his stupid made up word for the working class) down.

During our trek I gave Miller a real good telling off and told him exactly what I and everyone else thought of him. It really annoyed me though because Curly and Clint denied everything I said about what they thought of him, yet they laughed when Miller answered back that I had only changed my mind about moving to Torquay because I was hoping to pick up some nice sailors ass down there! When I pointed out that the only one with homosexual tenancies was in fact him, my oafish brother, because he cried when the bunch of men he obsessively love got knocked out of something called Euro 2000, Curly and Clint started calling me a knob and a bunch of other foul common names. As soon as I get to Torquay I’m going to make them regret the way they spoke to me! I sat at Michael Wood services reading The Daily Mail while the other three spanners played in the arcade until 7pm when Dad finally turned up to help us. We didn’t even set off for the car for over half an hour because we, me included (!), had to listen while Dad pointed out why each and every one of us was a fucking retard. I felt like pointing out that I was only here to save his business, thus too the family. He should have been rushing to see if I was okay, and apologizing for making me travel with by monkey wang brother. I certainly felt within my right to drop drawers and have him kiss my ass. I should have sternly pointed all this out to him, but as I feared he might have dropped dead of a heart attack any second as he face changed from red to purple, I decided to keep quiet (for now).

At 9pm we finally rolled into Torquay and I soon forgot about my stupid fellow passengers on the journey from Hell as I arrived in Heaven. Our new home is in a part of Torquay called Babbacombe and it is beautiful. Our new pub overlooks the serene sea and the awe inspiring scenery fills your entire view. I just stood and stared for ages. I felt like I was on a beautiful alien world. In Birmingham you are surrounded by depressing concrete everywhere, concrete towers, and concrete block council houses, its all so grey, but here it is gorgeous. Blue sky, turquoise sea, red cliff faces, an assortment of different greeneries and PALM tree’s too! This is where I belong. This is class.

None of us really went into the pub part tonight. Partly because it was the leaving do of the previous tenant but mainly because we spent ten minutes piling all of the boxes out of the removal van into a storage room and then spent hours trying to find things like the kettle, and my computer, which was buried at the bottom of that mountainous pile. The pub sounded really busy though, very lively.

I can’t wait to introduce myself to my people. The old King is dead, long live the KING! I've got a good feeling about this place. This is going to be a good chapter in the book of Cox!

Clint and I played a trick on Curly yesterday and I feel we may possibly have gone a bit too far…maybe

I bought this laptop off of Curly for a hundred quid after he said he could get computers from where he works (Dixons) with his staff discount. Curly’s been my constant companion (not in a gay way) for near enough a decade now. He is a tall broom stick of a lad. Big fucking boggly goldfish eyes with mad silly string hair the poor bastard. Most people wouldn’t give him the time of day but Jesus the lad is a hoot. Nothing he says is remotely funny, most of what comes out of his mouth is verbal wank. However the boy is a walking disaster. He is proper You’ve Been Framed gold. If you want a laugh, then Popeye here is your fall guy. Anyway, he brought around this computer to my house and it looked great. Top of the range. It wasn’t in a box but he said it was ex-display, which is why it was so cheap. The problem was that when I logged into the computer I kept noticing the name Erdington Mental Health Care popping up. It didn’t take too long for me to suss that the computer wasn’t brand new like Curly had said it was. The cheeky mop head twat!

Now I’m not fussed that it was nicked, the working classes have gotta make a living I suppose and we all know that minimum wage isn’t going to pay their wife beating lager costs. It is a foregone conclusion that everyone under middle class is on the rob. NO, I was pied off because he took a hundred quid off of me when I could have got a nicked computer off of Honest Bob for a tenner (He’s a noseless smack head who would steal his Moms in use tampon to order…an acquaintance of Moms, not mine). I was going to let it slide, but after telling Clint what had happened, he was adamant that matey should be taught a lesson for be liable with the truth. Clint is renowned (even feared) for his pranks and I must admit that his latest idea sounded quite good so I decide to run with it.

Following Clint’s instructions I called up Curly up just after 10pm and asked him where he got the computer from and he replied all innocently “Dixon’s J, why?”. “That’s alwright then” I answered dead straight “Cos when I hooked the computer up to the internet I got a message flash up asking where I got the system from. I thought it was a registration thing, so I put Dixon’s, your name and your address as reference, since I knew it wudda been on your discount card”. By this point I just heard Curly swearing like Nun getting one up the bum. At the time I was trying not to piss myself laughing because I wanted to sound as convincing as possible; so I continued “Anyway Curls, the message went really weird and said an officer would be visiting within 20 minutes. What does that mean? You work at Dixon’s, you know how this works. Does a sales rep come around to register your software package?” Curly completely ignored the last bit I said and started asking how long ago I got the message. I made the fooker sweat for a bit, saying that I wasn’t sure but then he started going as mad as Miss Piggy finding Kermit being rimmed by Fozzy Bear, so I relented and said I had gotten the message ten minutes ago.

Curly shouted something about only having ten minutes left. I heard him scream for his Mom and then the phone went dead. After that I didn’t think anymore of it, well I did. I went to sleep with a big Cheshire cat grin across my face because I’d got the jizz head back a good’un. What a great start I thought, August 17th was going to be even better though, one of the best days of my life…or so I thought.

Later in the night, well early in the morning actually, a drunken Miller came bouncing over me head at about 4 o’clock and woke me up because he spunked his guts up all over his duvet and pillow AND THEN PASSED OUT HEAD FIRST IN IT! It really stunk badly, like a bowl of sloppy shit in gone off milk. I couldn’t get back to sleep with that wafting in the air so I decided that I was going to kip downstairs on the living room settee.

I get downstairs and I hear noises coming from the back of our conservatory. I grabbed the nearest thing I could arm myself with (the end of the vacuum cleaner) and jumped outside ready to unleash my deadliest movie chops, but it turned out to be Curly.

I asked him what he was doing dozing in the back of our house. He said that he had to fess up, that the computer was nicked and that he was selling it for some geezer his Mom knew (Mom’s aye!). I was just about to laugh and shout ‘Gotcha’ but he continued ‘Our whole house is full of stolen stuff that this ‘friend’ of my Mom’s has been stashing there. After you called I tried to find my Mom but she wasn’t in. The thing is that this bloke Mom knows has been keeping loads of drugs in the house too. There were too many bags of pills and powder and too little time to figure out where to hid’em so I decided to flush the lot down the loo. At that point Mom came back and started screaming hysterically. I tried to explain why I’d done it but she said she’d rather have been arrested compared to what the dealers will do to her. She’s been working for someone she is really scared of but she wouldn’t say who it was! So now Mom has packed hers and Britney’s stuff and she’s is doing a midnight flit back to Ireland as we speak. She told me that I’d better hide too because they would use me to get to her! So please mate, you’ve gotta let me come to Torquay with you…please! We’ve had to leave Grandma behind. She’s probably hanging upside down from her wooly stockings as we speak’

On that note I said okay. What could I say? I couldn’t own up after that, ‘Sorry mate it was all a big joke!’ I’m pretty sure he’ll never ever find out that I was playing a prank on him, so I said he could come with us. Good’ol Curly, a total fuck up as usual.

Who knows, maybe I’ve actually done him a big favour? He’ll come live in Torquay, earn an honest living as my barman and I’ll try to help him out the best I can. Maybe I’ll teach him the ropes and let him run one of the next pubs I’ll get in a year or so time. His Granny was 70; she’s had a good innings.

I’ve been thinking about my father’s proposition about being the licensee of his new public house and I think that it is in fact a stellar idea. University is just one big waste of time. Who needs it? Not me. While everyone else is living a grubby stinky little student life, watching babies crawling on the ceiling, wearing their skiddy pants inside out in order to get an extra days wear, I’ll be in sunny Torquay making good money and building my middle class business empire. In years from now I’m sure I will probably meet most of these students, when ordering a take away at the nearest drive-thru.

Dad said he would rather me have my name above the door so to give me a leg up in life. I don’t blame him, he probably realizes that since I have a sixth form education I will have the superior ability to run a business. Miller said he wouldn’t be stupid enough to put his name to anything Dad’s doing, but he’s just jealous that I was asked and not him. It’s obvious he wouldn’t take it seriously, while Dad recognizes that I will turn it into the very best public house in the town. In fact Dad shouldn’t of just ‘asked’ me, he should of dropped to his knees and bloody well BEGGED me to help him run his business because I’m gonna make us all rich!

So I’m off to Torquay at the end of the week. I’ll help the family get this pub up and running and once it is a massive success by New Years, I will go and get myself another bar. I’ll be the next Richard Branson. He started off with a music shop above a shoe store and I’ll start my empire off with public houses. I’ve already started to make some notes:

1. Make it the best establishment in the southwest2. Make the family respectable, and law abiding!3. Invite celebrities to stay at the hotel over the pub and drink in our bar for free. We’ll make the money back because people will come in from all around the country to see’em at our place. I could also invite a TV crew to film me, Jacob Cox youngest licensee in the country, run my bar better than most landlords twice my age.4. Ban karaoke forever. We will be a class venue. Karaoke is stupid and we will have a finer type of people in our premise5. Open up more venues in a few months when The Royal Ship is making a fortune. Maybe think up a brand name like Virgin. Cox Shop?6. I will not drink!!! 7. DO NOT LET MILLER SLEEP WITH THE STAFF. In fact only hire ugly staff so Miller does not try to bed them and cause internal staffing problems.

Anyway, that’s all I can think of at the moment. I’ll keep updates as often as possible

I have decided to keep an online blog (diary) now that I have got a brand new laptop computer, which my best friend Curly (actual name Michel Butler) kindly got for me on the cheap last weekend. I would get a real diary but if my brother Miller found it he would denounce me as a homo butt plugger on the grounds of the diary being concrete proof (hence why I also could not and never can buy a Take That CD!). I also like the idea that people online can follow where I am going in life, because I think I will be going far! So these ‘accounts of my days’ are not only for me, but for future generations of Cox’s and all those interested in my great adventure through the years to greatness.

Monday 14th August 2000

1823 Hrs

DAY BEFORE A LEVEL RESULTS

I’m really excited about tomorrow because I will be getting my A level results and then I can at last escape from my repugnant family. That might sound a bit harsh, maybe nasty and you can be forgiven for asking what terrible actions they might be guilty of. Do they beat me, abuse me, ignore me? No. They do however fecking annoy me.

Until recently my tiny wild haired Irish mother (along with her raggy prehistoric side of the family) was in the business of beating the living pootang out of people and sticking their pet’s heads up where the sun doesn’t shine. Why? Because if you were unfortunate enough to run a pub, club, shop or even a paper round on the west side of Birmingham, you paid the O’Shea’s clan not to do these lovely things to you basically. A family to be proud of. Not!

My ratty face Father is in the business of running up debt and then running away. I have many fond memories as a child of listening to him answering the phone in a woman’s voice, proclaiming never to have heard of a Mr. J. Cox. He once took to wearing women’s clothes around the house. He wasn’t a cross dresser, really, it was just in case the bailiffs came unexpectedly. We expected their unexpected visits almost weekly.

There is also my brother Clint who is a bit of a slick Frank Sinatra wannabe, the cuckoo in the nest because he towers over the rest of his short arse family, looking down on us with his deep blue eyes and bastard good looks. Last of all is my sister Marie who is very quiet, in a disconcerting kind of way. She has lots of friends around her at most times but not one of the miserable ickle boggy nose munchkins look like they like her.

I feel that I have been trapped on an island of savages. I’m sure there has been a horrible mistake, I couldn’t possibly belong here. Perhaps a plane crashed or I was washed ashore, where I was unfortunate enough to be adopted by the local tribe. Now though I have become a man and I have built myself a boat. Tomorrow I will leave this god forsaken island. I will row away and leave the lords to their flies. Goodbye all. Return I shall not.

Yes tomorrow at 1400 hrs I will go to my old school for the last time to collect my exam results and then I can begin my journey to university. I need nothing less than C’s in English, Math’s and History (though I’m expecting B’s at least). My family is moving to Torquay at the end of the week to take over a public house that my Father has ‘somehow’ managed to acquire. He asked me the other day to be its licensee. HA! Noooooooo fookin way! I will be staying with Curly once my family has moved, and then I’ll hopefully be going to Oxford to study law.

About Memoirs of a bar steward

Jacob Cox is 18 and finds himself running his family's new business, a dilapidated bar in a forgotten seaside town. Jacob longs to escape his family of villains, liars and psychopaths. Could the bar be his last chance to make money and get away from everyone he despises? Is his family really that bad or is he actually worse than all of them put together?

To make the business a success he needs help from his dangerous twin brother Miller, his disastrous best friend Curly and his annoyingly cool younger brother Clint. It's a perilous undertaking with monstrous foes and maybe even love (or just deadly sex). If his con artist father, gang member mother, and his sinister little sister Marie don't destroy his plans, maybe, just maybe he can escape.

A screwball comedy about a dysfunctional family who need each other to survive.

SAMPLE BLOG ENTRY:

Saturday 19th August 2000

1542 Hrs

THE MEETING

Dad should be French. He gives up too easily. He spends too much time feeling sorry for himself, and not enough time doing anything useful. He woke me up early this morning at 10am to tell me that he was calling a critical family meeting this afternoon (secret from Mom of course) at 1 o‟clock, because he had something very important to discuss with all of the family. Dad of course didn‟t really have the authority to call meetings about my business but I thought I would indulge him; he might surprise me and have something useful to say.

“Last night I learnt new information which caused me to **** my pants”. Well done Dad, what a great way to start a business conference, I should use that line when I‟m in Parliament in a few years. He went on to explain to Miller, Clint and Curly what the late Bertie and Antony had told me and him before they killed each other last night (basically that the pub makes **** all money).

“I‟ve got enough dough to keep this place running for roughly a month. If it isn‟t making any money by the end of that period, then we‟re ****ed. We‟re gonna lose the business, we‟re gonna lose the roof over our heads and I‟m gonna lose….well we‟re all going to lose our shot at the good life. What I want from you lot are ideas to get the punters and the money rolling in”

I tried to tell Dad that he was worrying for no reason, that I had a Masterplan but he wasn‟t having any of it. He said that he wanted us all to go off and have a good, long, hard think. He has called another meeting (yet again he stressed, no word to Mom about it) for 3 o‟clock tomorrow, where he wants to hear what we have come up with. He said he will be picking only one idea and then we all must concentrate our combined efforts on it. Well if it makes the Umpa Loompas feel like they are contributing, then I suppose it will make for a happier chocolate factory, but I‟m sure everyone will see that I am the big Willy Wonka here!

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Author

Memoirs of a bar steward is created by Scott Evans. If you would like to get in touch with the author you can email him at